Best Google Places Troubleshooting Posts (2011 – Early 2012)

Local Google is a minefield of bugs, glitches, often-murky “Quality Guidelines,” sudden algorithm changes, and possibly unethical competitors. Tiptoeing your way around all the hazards requires luck or know-how. If you don’t feel like playing Russian Roulette with your business’s local presence, then you’d probably prefer the extra know-how.

“But Phil, I’m not having any problems in Google Places…I just want to rank higher.”

Well, if you want to rank more visibly, you first need to make sure your wings aren’t being clipped by a host of particularly common hazards. Even if you’re already ranking well in Google Places, you need to know how to identify, fix, or prevent these problems. Just because you haven’t encountered them doesn’t mean you won’t.

That’s why I’ve rounded up 7 posts that help to troubleshoot some difficulties you might encounter—or maybe have encountered—in Google Places.

Taking a few minutes to read these posts might just be enough to get you out of whatever Google-related jam you’re in—or to prevent future troubles.

Problem: Spam Reviews from Competitors
Are your competitors spreading lies or talking smack about you—on your own Google Places page? Here are some great tips for handling spam reviews. By the way, I suggest you read all the comments on that post; there are some great suggestions in there as well.

No problem! Thanks for putting together such excellent posts, as always. Seems to me that you could assemble them into a superb free report that people could sign up to get, or eventually combine them into one monolithic, comprehensive troubleshooting guide. Anyway, just my two cents!

I’ve actually thought of doing so, but things change so fast I am scared someone might use them as a reference in some point in the future when they would not be valid anymore. Thus, I prefer not to risk with doing so. Instead I encourage people to bookmark and/or subscribe for blogs like yours. There are only a handful of others that provide so much and so comprehensive information, so it should not be a problem for even an SMB owner to follow up.

Point taken–although I think you could do one hell of a post and/or report on your Google Places troubleshooting methodology. Obviously, there are underlying techniques (other than just critical thinking) that help you deal with a wide variety of problems. Maybe it could be called “10 Techniques for Dealing with ANY Problem in Google Places.”

Great question–I wish I had a great answer. Basically, missing reviews is a HUGE bug in Google Places. If you have a bunch of Google reviews (as opposed to reviews on third-party sites) that disappear entirely, there’s nothing you can do but wait for Google to restore them. The good news, though, is that Google usually does restore them. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, but they usually return.

So, there’s a bug floating around that probably explains it. But if your reviews have been gone for more than a couple of weeks…or if it’s not only Google reviews that are missing…or if you just don’t think it’s the “general” bug that’s causing it but instead something specific to your listing, feel free to shoot me a link to your Places page and I’ll have a look.

[…] Google Places has finished shaking itself up – as is confirmed by Phil Rozek in Canada on Local Visibility SystemIn addition, we also seem to have lost our ability to make short posts ‘from the […]